Course info

Rating

(187)

Level

Intermediate

Updated

December 2, 2013

Duration

2h 50m

Description

Lua is an extremely versatile and popular programming language that you’ll find embedded in many other applications like Adobe’s Lightroom or even World of Warcraft. Many developers are surprised to find that even very popular games like Angry Birds are written in Lua. In this course, you’ll learn how to quickly get started writing programs and scripts with Lua. I’ll take you through the basics of Lua, show you some tricks that demonstrate the Lua’s flexibility and even show you how to use Lua in an object oriented way. We’ll start off in this course by learning a bit about Lua itself and Lua’s history, as well as learn how to download Lua and use the popular SciTE IDE for creating and running Lua code. After we are setup and ready to develop some Lua code, we’ll learn the basics of Lua as we jump right in and build our first application. We’ll go over Lua’s type system and learn how to assign variables, utilize operators, use conditional logic and create loops. Once we’ve got the basics covered, we’ll explore two powerful concepts in Lua: functions and tables. We’ll learn how functions work in Lua and what makes them so powerful, and we’ll see how tables can be used for more than just storing simple data. Even though Lua itself doesn’t have a class construct, we’ll learn how to do object oriented programming in Lua using tables and metatables. Finally, we’ll wrap up the course by learning a little bit about the standard libraries that come with Lua. I’ll show you some examples of using some of the most useful functions in the standard libraries and show you where you can get more information about them.